A Sceptical Islamist

Ahmadinejad to face ICC trial?

The BBC today reports that an Israeli minister has suggested that Israel could kidnap Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and deliver him for trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

The idea is ludicrous of course; among many other things, the ICC would never want the precedent of one state using it as a pretext for unilateral and illegal action against another one.  The suggestion and the coverage it is receiving is simply another part of the campaign of the demonization of Iran generally, and Ahmedinejad in particular, being led by the US and Israel.

A couple of interesting points arise, however. 

Radovan Karadzic, Omar Bashir and the realities of international law

(Editorial, Crescent International, August 2008.)

The arrest in Serbia of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 22 has understandably been greeted with celebrations around the world.  During the Serbo-Croatian attempt to exterminate the Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1995, Karadzic was political leader of the Serbs living in Bosnia, whose forces (led militarily by Ratko Mladic, who remains a fugitive) were responsible for the most appalling atrocities of the war, including (but not only) the establishment of concentration camps such as those of Omarska and Trnopolje early in the war, the siege of Sarajevo, and the massacre of Srebenica in 1995.  Thirteen years after being indicted for his responsibility for the deaths of nearly 8,000 men and boys at Srebenica, Karadzic had been living in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and working as an alternative medical practitioner under the pseudonym Dragan David Drabic.  It is widely suspected that some in the Belgrade government had been aware of his identity and whereabouts but had protected him from arrest; and that the timing of his arrest at this time has much to do with the political interests of the new Serbian government elected in May.  Meanwhile, the search for Mladic, his former partner in genocide, continues.

Milosevic's show-trial little reason for celebration

"History, of course, is not the only thing that is defined by the victors; so too is justice. Milosevic may deserve any and every fate that awaits him, and so too may Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and other Serbs still sought by the Tribunal. That does not change the fact that the tribunal is a show-court established by the victors to try their enemies, and designed to ensure not justice but the illusion of justice. The fact is that justice cannot be achieved by politically-charged bodies and institutions dominated and controlled by forces that are themselves unjust..."